Annotating Satire in Italian Political Commentaries with Appraisal Theory

This paper presents annotation work to manually classify satire/sarcasm in long commentaries on Italian politics. It is based on Appraisal Theory and uses some 30K word texts. The underlying hypothesis is that using this framework it is possible to pinpoint precisely the deep semantic contents of evaluative judgements and appreciations making up an ironic comment. We performed a high level annotation using major categories, and then refined the classification starting from the lexica derived from the xml annotated files. In this way we succeeded in differentiating texts by the two authors we chose, one of which is characterized by a sharp cutting ironic/almost sarcastic style.